Adobe Patches Critical Vulnerabilities in Shockwave Player

Adobe has released an updated version of its popular Shockwave Player for Windows to resolve two critical vulnerabilities newly discovered in the product.

Discovered by Tongbo Luo of Palo Alto Networks, the two memory corruption vulnerabilities (CVE-2015-6680 and CVE-2015-6681) have been rated “critical” and have received a priority level 1, because they could enable an attacker to take control over an affected systems and execute malicious code.

According to Adobe’s Sept. 8 security bulletin, all of the Adobe Shockwave Player version 12.1.9.160 and earlier releases are affected by these vulnerabilities. The current release of the software, version 12.2.0.162, resolves both of these security issues.

While Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild targeting the vulnerabilities, users are advised to update their Adobe Shockwave Player installations as soon as possible. 

The Shockwave Player security update is the fourth in a recent series of releases that Adobe has pushed out over the past several weeks in an attempt to resolve security flaws in its products.

On August 11, the company released updated versions of the Adobe Flash Player and AIR SDK products to address no less than 35 vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Mac and Linux systems.

One week later, on August 18, the company released a security hotfix to resolve an XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability in LiveCycle Data Services (DS) that could result in information disclosure, and which affected different product versions on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

At the end of August, Adobe pushed a hotfix for the ColdFusion development platform, aimed at addressing an important vulnerability in the product. The flaw could be exploited to compromise data security on the affected systems.